At the University of Liverpool

Monthly Archives: November 2014

John Garstang was one the early pioneers in the use of photography as a method of recording archaeological excavations, artefacts and surveys. The museum’s photographic archive contains almost twenty collections of glass-plate negatives relating to Garstang’s archaeological research in Egypt, Sudan and the Near East. These photographs give an insight not only into how excavations were carried out during the early part of the twentieth century but also record now lost artefacts and sites, as well as showing us a little of what life was like for Garstang and his teams.

The Pilgrim Trust funded ‘Ancient Egypt in Focus’ project aims to catalogue and digitise a portion of the photographic collections held by the Garstang Museum, specifically, those relating to John Garstang’s excavations in Egypt and Sudan at the sites of Meroë, Abydos, and Beni Hasan. This process will ensure the preservation of these images, they will also be published online on the Archives Hub so that others may also view these images.

In 2011, the Hertitage Lottery Funded ‘The Lost Gallery: John Garstang and the discovery of the Hittite World’ project processed the Museum’s photographic collections relating to Garstang’s work in the Near East, including the excavation of Sakçagözü, Turkey. The negatives were digitized using a digital camera suspended above an adjustable platform from which the negatives could be illuminated by a light box below. The equipment was fully adjustable to cater for different size and formats of negatives. In six months the project processed nearly 900 images. For the digitisation of the Egyptian and Sudanese negatives, the project will last for fifteen months, allowing for an even greater number of negatives to be processed, indeed, the new project hopes to process over 2000 images!

Interns using the digitization equipment during the Hittite project

It is early days in the project but we will be making frequent updates about our progress here on the blog and on our facebook page

For more information about the project please contact the project archivist, Katie Waring ( kdw@liverpool.ac.uk)